Building a colony from the ground up is never easy, but we took a swing at it in the first 45 minutes of Tropico 6 by Limbic Entertainment.

Following our character creation of a charismatic mafiosa dictator with a love of Wes Anderson-esque pastels, it was time to jump into the first mission of the Tropico 6 campaign — starting off in the spot where you first meet series favorite sycophant, Penultimo! To check out what exactly happened (and how we stumbled through the game’s control scheme), watch the 45-minute video below.

As a quick TL;dr, Tropico 6 starts off like the previous game — as a colony, you are beholden to the Royal Family as you look to keep power by extending your royal mandate of governorship. Through expanding your exports, developing trade routes, and researching colonial technology, you begin making strides towards becoming a more independent nation-state. And to help push that along, you also have the backing of a growing rebel movement that wants to keep the crown away from your loyal citizens.

As an interesting wrinkle — and one we are looking to explore — there are some great deviations from Tropico 5. Most notably (within this play session) was the ability to work with multiple islands (instead of just one) and the pirate-based missions that give you an alternate (and extra-judicial) means of harvesting resources. Without a doubt, there is more depth to this series than in previous iterations, and fans of city-creation games have a lot to get lost in.

While the game does look beautiful in its brief 45-minute session, keep in mind that it is still a beta; we can likely expect things to get shaken up and polished further within the next few months as the team nears launch.

Tropico 6 will release in January 2019 on PC; Summer 2019 for PS4 and Xbox One. If you haven’t grabbed a pre-order for the game yet (to unlock the pre-order content), you can do that via Amazon. Meanwhile, check out the gameplay footage below:

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Lou Contaldi is the Editor-in-Chief at DualShockers, specializing in both reviews and the business behind gaming. He began writing about tech and video games while getting his Juris Doctor at Hofstra University School of Law. He is maybe the only gaming journo based in Nashville, TN.